This Is How You Achieve LASTING Change By Rewiring Your BELIEFS | Jonas Kaplan

Jonas Kaplan, welcome to the show. Thank you. Happy to be here. I am very happy to have you. As I was saying before we started rolling, anything about the brain, beliefs, like all that stuff is is my absolute sweet spot, my total obsession. All right. And as somebody who studies this for a living, I want to start with the idea of beliefs. I think beliefs govern your behaviors, behaviors govern your life. Therefore, the quality of your life is basically the quality of your beliefs. But most people, I have found, mistake their chosen beliefs for objective truth. And they don't realize that they're they have chosen throughout life to believe things, whether their parents told them to or whatever, but they have decided that certain things are true. Talk to me, how do beliefs get formed? Yeah, that's right. So, they can form very early in life, almost through osmosis. The brain starts to build models of the world. I mean, if you think about what the brain is there for, that's the way I like to start with this. there for? What is the brain there for? Really, the brain is there to keep our bodies alive, right? The brain is a complicated solution to the problem of homeostasis, [snorts] to the problem of maintaining a complicated organism like the human body. Do you have a thesis on why we developed really uh big brains? Well, our brains could have been bigger. I mean, it's interesting thing about the size of a brain isn't necessarily the important thing. For a high-powered intellect. We want smart brains, right? Not necessarily big brains. And uh actually, what happened is the brain got wrinklier and wrinklier to fit more and more surface area in the same head. Because, you know, if we just kept getting bigger and bigger heads, you would have issues. It's an issue at some point. It's pelvis becomes an issue issue in walking and all that kind of stuff. So, but do you have a thesis on that? Was it for locomotion? Was it for something else? Was it for social cooperation? I think all of those things. I mean, basically problem-solving. As life gets more and more complicated, there are more and more problems to solve. Some of those problems are motor problems, you know, how do I get inside this bottle to get a grape that's stuck at the bottom. Some of them are social. How do I deal with living within a community of individuals where everybody's got different intentions and different um beliefs, and I have to navigate that whole situation. So, it's not one thing. The brain is a in many ways a general-purpose problem-solver. But, all those problems do have to do with maintaining life and keeping us alive. And as part of doing that, the brain builds a model of the world that it has to navigate, right? It builds a simulated picture of what the world is like. That's where beliefs come from. That's the basis of beliefs. Some of them are built into us from the course of evolution itself. We have beliefs about gravity and about shadows that are built into the very perceptual system that we have, right? Meaning, no matter what you're going to have those. You're born with them, and they are going to influence how you understand the world, how you see, and how you hear, and how you touch things, and how you respond to them. And then Are there some optical illusions or illusions of some kind that reveal those things? There's so many optical illusions. For example, when you have a uh you know, there are you can show that two different patches of light on a page that look very different to us. One looks dark gray, one looks light gray, actually result from the same amount of light hitting our retina. And just because one of them falls within the cast shadow of an object, the brain reasons that it must be actually lighter and be you know, it's darker cuz of the shadow. see that test for the first time, it seems impossible. I remember thinking, nope, this they're playing a trick and they they're leading me to try to make like my cognitive dissonance go away or something cuz there's no way these are actually the same color. It's And then you fold the paper and you're like, what the [ __ ] Like it is the most bizarre experience. We believe our perceptions. We believe our eyes and it's very convincing to see something. It seems like when you see it, it's out there in the world as it is, right? But perception is a constructive process. The brain is making hypotheses about what's out there and it's confirming and disconfirming those hypotheses. You remember the whole blue dress, yellow dress thing that happened? You're really helping me bring this up. Yeah. I still can't fathom that other people see it differently. Right. Which which way did you see it? remember now, but I remember when I saw it, I was like, "What do you mean?" Either I saw it as blue or gold, I don't remember which. But I was looking at it going, "Well, this is obviously blue." Let's say. And I was like, "I don't understand how it is even remotely conceivable that people see it as gold." Like I still to this day. No, it's really hard to believe. It just seems like they must be completely wrong. But their brain is just being were messing with me again. I was like, "It's not possible." Like the because there are some optical illusions and and the reason that I want to go in on this for anybody listening is there there are some things that are hardwired to your point about evolution has given you these things. So, the idea of gravity hardwired, the idea of shadows mean something hardwired, uh things going more blue at distance hardwired. Like there are just all these things that our brain uses as born-in context to make sense of the world. The point is to get people to understand that these things that you perceive are constructed realities. They are not objective truth and that will have deep implications, I'm sure, as we continue this conversation. It certainly has deep implications in people's lives. But uh how convincing these perceptions can be is really jarring. So, going to the the blue-gold thing, what's going on there? So, the shadow I get, so your brain goes, "Oh, something in shadow it means that some of the luminosity is being blocked. It's not actually changing the color." Yeah. But the blue-gold one? The brain is making two different assumptions in two different people about the context of the color, right? So, you could have a color that looks blue in a bright light or yellow in a dark light produces the same actual wavelength of light on the object. So, depending on what you assume that ambient light is, your brain's going to make a different conclusion about what color the thing is. And what you perceive as your actual conscious reality is that conclusion itself, right? It's not the actual You people think of perception as a passive read off that there's light hitting the retina and there are certain things that happen in the specialized neurons that are in the retina, and that's true. But, what we perceive is not the activity in the retina, right? That activity guides the uh hypotheses and the conclusions that the brain The inferences that the brain makes about what's out there. And what we actually perceive is the result of those inferences. Yeah. So, this is where things get really weird for me. So, I've made my whole life essentially is about figuring out the ways in which my brain is not working for me. And that became a real big breakthrough for me in my early 20s where I was really sliding towards a dark place. I was not enjoying my life. I felt very trapped by my lack of intellect. And so, I I found that really emotionally distressing. And it was only once I realized brain plasticity was real, I could change things, that that sort of lightened up a little bit for me that I thought, "Okay, I can get better." But, then as you start going down the process of getting better and you start learning about the brain, you realize, "Wait a second, all these things that I assumed were just objectively true even a lot of those things, well, in fact, all of those things, literally all for everybody listening, everything that you think is real is your brain's best interpretation to an end. And I've heard you talk a lot about motivated thinking. Motivated thinking in science is incredibly dangerous. You want something to be true, and therefore you find yourself like being nudged even subconsciously towards that. Going back to beliefs, that's what I think happens with beliefs. You have like you said, through osmosis, gained a belief. So, you didn't do anything necessarily intentionally, but you have this belief. Now, your brain, trying to be consistent, is interpreting everything that you see through that belief. And it can lead people to very suboptimal outcomes in their life. Yes. There's a couple things in there that are important. One is the brain's drive towards consistency. And that is really interesting. The brain wants to have a coherent view of the world. Taking it back to perception, we see this in very simple perceptual ways with, you know, for example, the blind spot is another perceptual example of this. We have this part of our retina that doesn't receive any information from the visual world. So, we're literally blind in one part of our visual field. Because it's where the optic nerve optic nerve leaves, right? Normally, you know, you have two eyes, so one eye covers for the other. But, if you close one eye, you still don't see a gap in the world. There's not a perception of nothingness. The brain papers over that gap. It tries to make a consistent picture of the world. It fills it in like Photoshop, right? We see That's so freaky. Yeah. And it you know, it that that principle extends beyond perception, that the brain wants to create a consistent view of the world. And that provides a motivation to find information that's consistent with what we think. Mhm. The Photoshop effect of your brain filling that in, I know there's a rare condition where people that go blind actually begin to hallucinate a full visual field, which just seems crazy. But, that tells me that we're storing an insane amount of information. Now, the people that have that um problem, are they saying, "I am experiencing the world exactly as I was experiencing it before I went blind?" Or, is there a more dream-like sense to it? Yeah, it's complicated. First of all, this is an extremely rare condition. This is not something that happens a lot. This is called Anton syndrome. It happens with damage to the visual cortex, so the brain can no longer see. Can't interpret signals from the outside world. But, the brain is very good at imagining, at creating false perceptual experiences for us using recall, using memory. Things from memory can regenerate very vivid perceptual experiences. Now, imagination is never exactly the same as reality, and most of us can tell the difference most of the time. So, I think for a lot of these patients, there's a combination of some kind of confabulatory perceptual machinery going on where the brain is making all of these um hallucinations, these imaginations, combined with some kind of denial. The brain doesn't want to admit that it's losing information. A part of this papering over process of giving us a consistent view of the world can sometimes involve denying certain realities like I'm blind. Can you give an example of the way that people with selective damage to their brain will make up a story? For instance, the one that I know is uh if you can no longer form long-term memories, but if you do something that triggers the pain response, they'll respond They They will have learned the pain response, so they'll know to avoid that. If And then when you ask them why they're avoiding that thing, which, you know, outwardly would not lead to pain, but they've been through the trick, as it were, by the doctors, and they'll make something up. Oh, yeah, I don't trust people in white lab coats, and they'll make it sound completely logical. Yeah. We call that confabulations. Brain is filling in gaps, and you know, one of the interesting forms of that I've encountered in my career is with a condition called the split brain. This is what I studied when I first started in graduate school. This is a condition where the two hemispheres of the brain have been surgically separated. So, a surgeon went in there as a treatment for epilepsy. It's kind of a drastic thing to do. This is a surgeon Surgery was done back in the '50s before we had really good epilepsy drugs. People were having seizures all day long, and there really weren't a lot of good options. Sometimes you would go in there and just, you know, cut things. And there was a reason to believe that the fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain, it's a big bundle of fibers called the corpus callosum. And if you cut the corpus callosum, the seizures would stop spreading from one side of the brain to the others. This was an effective treatment. But it left person with two completely separated cerebral hemispheres. It's like having two brains in one head. And what we could do in the lab is we could demonstrate that when you show a picture to one side of say the visual field, it's processed by the opposite hemisphere. And in a healthy brain, that information would just transfer over the corpus callosum and both hemispheres would know what it was that was out there. But in a split-brain person, that can't happen. So, when you feed information to one side of the visual field, you're feeding it to one hemisphere. You can then ask them what they saw. Now, one of the big difference between the left and the right hemispheres has to do with speech. Left hemisphere is really good at talking. Right hemisphere basically can't control the mechanisms of speech. So, if you show a picture to the left side of the screen of one of these split to one of these split-brain patients and ask them what it is that they saw, they would say, "I didn't I didn't see anything." Uh you know, cuz it's their left hemisphere that's talking. But then bananas. They do know the right hemisphere does know what it saw. Is the right hemisphere screaming out like this is [ __ ] Like I know. Like Is Is there other hand like writing furiously? You know, that That side of my brain is lying. I know exactly what this is. Yeah, that's right. So, if you ask them to the left hand to draw, then then they'll draw. Do they Do they have awareness? Like so, the the part that is speaking in brain patients are like this is This must be the most interesting thing in neuroscience to me. So, just uh really push on this point. Yeah. The part of them that can speak will say that they don't know what it is. But does the part of them that can speak have an awareness of the other side? Right. So, this is where the confabulation comes in. Yes, they do. I mean, not only do they have that awareness of the other side, they they know they had this surgery, right? One of our patients was probably We joked that he was like the world expert in split-brain research because he read absolutely every paper that was written about him. And also, the brain is disconnected at the level of the cerebral cortex, which is the highest level of the brain, but it's still unified the level of the brain stem, which contains some of the um more basic functions that have to do with regulating the the internals of the body. So, they would have feelings about what the right hemisphere saw. The left hemisphere would get a sense or an intuitive notion of what it was, and then it would make up a story to explain it. They'd say, "Oh, it's something funny. It must have been uh you know, a woman slipping on a banana peel." And would it be a woman slipping on a banana peel? Usually, they weren't that accurate. The other thing they would do would be funny? It would be funny. So, they're reading the emotion, right? They get some some feeling about this some sense of the emotional tone of it. Whoa. The other thing this patient I I want to Sorry, I want to keep pushing on one idea. I'm so curious. Is there a sense? Like, it I know nothing about what it would be like to have my corpus callosum split. However, my like, if you've ever in a dream where you can't speak, there's there is an intense frustration. Mhm. Does there Is it the right hemisphere that can't speak? Okay, so is the right hemisphere Is there any sense of agitation that it's being asked a question? Cuz I'm assuming because of the ears, both sides are hearing. So, it knows it's being asked a question, to which it has some information. An image cuz I know one of the people would He had a trick where he would draw it on the back of the the other hand. [ __ ] insane. But that tells me that that that that part of the brain like really wants to be understood or to to articulate like Is there that sense of frustration? I don't think so. It never really um was expressed. If it was there, the right hemisphere is kind of happy-go-lucky. It doesn't seem to care one way or the other. It was pretty chill, pretty relaxed right hemisphere. I mean, they would answer if you asked them to, but I never got the sense that it was like locked-in syndrome or was like trying to communicate and you couldn't. Well, again, the left hand was like the way the right hemisphere could express itself. Would you need to only speak into the right ear? Does the right ear go to the right side? That seems like it must. The separation of the auditory tract is not as clear as the visual tract. So, each ear goes to both sides, more heavily to one side than the other, but you can't you can't do it that way. But, you would just talk to them and both hemispheres would hear it, but the right hemisphere could respond in How different are the personalities? That's a really tricky thing to get at, and we did a lot of different things to try to get at that, asking them questions, you know, "What's your favorite music?" Do they have different like preferences about things? Sometimes, for some patients, they would the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere would express different preferences, but it's not, you know, it's hard to say. This is a very again, very small number of people, so When you're talking to a split-brain patient, how much um like how different would they say they are? Like anybody that's a long time listener of this show has heard me talk about Phineas Gage before. Uh massive brain trauma ends up completely changing his personality, even though he never loses consciousness. Uh utterly fascinating. Is a split-brain patient the same where it's like if you were in a relationship with that person, you'd be like, "They are just not the same." Or would it be mostly the same? It's mostly the same. You know, these things that we do to demonstrate the disconnection syndrome they involve laboratory tricks. I mean, most of the time the eyes are moving around in the visual field. If one hemisphere wants to see something, it can just move, you know, you can get information just needs that eye. Yeah, it just needs It's not just the eye, but it's each one half of each eye goes to each hemisphere. So, the left the left side of what you're looking at, like if you focus on one thing, the left side of the world, which falls on both eyes, will be routed to the opposite hemisphere. Wow. So, you can't just like it's not just a closing an eye situation. [laughter] That is exactly what I was picturing. the story is that they're pretty much indistinguishable from anyone else. The The reality is that they had this surgery because they lived with uh terrible epilepsy for many, many years. And so, there are impairments that result from that life that they lived where I see. you know, you you would notice some things. Okay, very interesting. Interesting about seizures just that you can have an electrical storm that actually passes and shows that every synapse is basically responding to the one that came before. And so, if it's dysfunctioning, then it's going to send that dysfunction around and around and around. Yeah, it's a chain reaction. Very interesting. Okay, so split-brain patients, um I have heard and I don't know if this is accurate, but that they there is um a potential for a difference of beliefs. So, bring this all back around, the one that I heard and your face tells me that this is probably not accurate or that it's uh exaggerated, but what I heard is that one side was religious, like devoutly religious, and the other side was strictly atheist. Interesting. I would be skeptical about that. I'm not pr- I'm not familiar with that particular story. I mean, one of the things with the split-brain situation is that it really caught fire and the public mind. I mean, it's such a fascinating, amazing thing that shows us something about the unity of our own consciousness, right? If we could potentially have these two minds in one head, what does it say about our actual minds that are sort of, you know, loosely connected? And so, it was really interesting to people the differences between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, and all those things have become cartoonishly exaggerated over time. The fact is that left hemisphere and right hemisphere are pretty similar to each other. There are differences, but the differences tend to be relative. The left hemisphere will be slightly more skilled, a little bit quicker, a little bit faster at certain things. Right hemisphere might be a little bit better at certain other things, visual-spatial things. But the kind of um situation you're talking about with two totally different belief systems, I I'd be pretty skeptical of that. Have you ever thought, I'm sure you haven't studied it, but have you ever thought about what the difference is between a split-brain patient and um twins that are connected at the head? Yeah, I mean that that's a really interesting case. I guess it would depend on the particular um details of their connection. Do they share a brain? I don't I haven't I've never looked into this, but when I was researching for this episode, and you I've never heard anybody go into as much detail about split-brain patients as you have, so it's always been at the periphery of my fascination. Um and then I just started thinking, why do I find this so interesting? And the reason I find it interesting is I often my life is about getting very good at managing competing impulses inside my brain. And so when you started describing what happens when you sever the ability for the two to because a lot of what happens in the brain is inhibitory impulses. Yeah. Which I find utterly fascinating, and we will certainly talk about transcranial magnetic stimulation and how you can like get really interesting effects by disrupting areas of the brain. Um but the idea that the thing that me as a person is good at is going oh, reacting uh in a high anxious way to this, that doesn't make sense. And so I'm going to regulate that impulse. Um wanting to eat this thing. No, that doesn't serve my goals. I'm going to But the impulse is there, and it's really intense. Right. And so or a voice, you know, where I'm telling myself that I'm a loser. But then another part of me is like, that doesn't make sense. And so stop repeating that. Right. And so it's like when when you then hear about, oh, those two things, and I get this is the cartoonish way to think about it, but those two things are essentially they they each have their side, and once they can't communicate and now they're sort of left unbalanced, unbalanced, unchecked, they would spin up into their sort of own personality. That feels so right to what life feels like to me Right. that I glommed onto the cartoony version of that. No, I mean that I think the essence of what you're saying is getting at some truth about the brain, which is that it's a collection of disparate processes that are in many ways stitched together to form the illusion of a coherent self, right? The self is an illusion and we can get deeper into that. But there's a there's a symptom that often comes along with the split brain that I think uh speaks to what you're talking about. It's called often called the alien hand syndrome, which involves uh an action that the person doesn't feel like they're doing themselves. So it could be like, you know, one hand is buttoning the shirt and the other hand is unbuttoning it. Sometimes happens. Dr. Strangelove? Yeah, exactly. That's so hilarious. Um that actually happens. You know, not only with the split brain, but also with damage to a part of the brain called the supplementary motor area, which is involved in the selection and an inhibition of actions where you can get, you know, the hand just like doing things on its own. It's very freaky because they can be very goal-directed, organized actions that don't accord with what the person feels like is their own will. And that is an experience that we all have to some degree, like what you're describing, you know, we have competing impulses that we have to select among as part of the challenge that the brain has in in organizing our behavior. So now the question is, how do we organize our behavior like at a functional level? I've always referred to this as my Overwatch mechanism. So I feel like there's the lesser me and uh that wants to eat the cake, the ice cream, the whatever, and then there is my Overwatch mechanism, which says, "These are my goals. This is my value system." So I either do or do not do that thing based on that. Um and this is why I've never done anything dumb while intoxicated or anything like that. My my And and maybe this is just luck of the draw, but that Overwatch mechanism never leaves. Uh admittedly, I don't like go hard on substances of any kind, so maybe that's just part of it. That I'm always sort of sub-threshold. But that overwatch mechanism feels like a very important part of my life, and so I'm curious what is that? Yeah. I mean, I think in cognitive neuroscience we would call that executive control. The systems in the brain that do watch over the others that are there to choose what it is that we do, to keep our actions in accord with long-term goals instead of with short-term goals, to inhibit certain motivations and to emphasize others, to control everything from, you know, attentional control is part of this. Where do you actually put your focus in any given moment? Like right now there's a lot of things around us that we could be paying attention to, but it involves some kind of effort to keep focused on my voice as I'm speaking. That's the same executive control network in the brain that's doing that kind of direction of our action all the time. And are we going to round that off to the prefrontal cortex? Like what are we where is that coming from? Yeah. In the brain. I would say, before I answer that question, we always have to have the caveat of, you know, assigning um mental functions to specific brain regions is problematic. You know, when we look at the brain, it's so complicated, everything's so interconnected, that each region of the brain is not corresponding to one particular mental function for for the most part. Um but there certainly are brain networks that we know are more important for executive function. The prefrontal cortex in cooperation with the parietal lobe forms what we call an executive control network that involves a lot of these these functions. I think this might be the the big takeaway that I have from researching you is how many different areas are contributing some small thing to your perception, to your sense of self, to your beliefs, to your actions, whatever, that it's actually a ton of little areas that all contribute like one little thing. Like if you've ever uh anybody that's ever been on a treadmill is probably a great example. And then you step off and you still feel like like the world is moving forward because you've been moving even though you haven't been going anywhere. And then as soon as you step off and stop, there are regions of your brain that still read they they are so expecting that movement that it it takes a minute for that to stop. Yeah. Expectation and prediction is a huge part of what the brain does. I mean there there are many people now that actually believe that prediction is sort of the basic organizing principle that explains all of what the brain does Interesting. at all times because constantly creating some expectation of what's going to happen and then reading off what happens, making a comparison, and adjusting its expectations based on what it reads in. All right. Now coming back to your beliefs, this idea of beliefs and predictions um I often say to myself and anybody who will listen that you see what you look for. And another way to think about that at the brain level is you're going to see what you believe. You're going to see what you predict, right? So if your brain is predicting, you know, like you were saying in these lighting conditions, that must be blue. Then you're going to see blue. And if your brain says no, in these lighting conditions, that must be yellow. Then you see yellow. And you and the person next to you one sees blue and one sees yellow. Seems impossible, but it actually is true. How does that like how do we begin to tease that apart? Like I mean you must think about this in your own life in terms of okay, I have these beliefs, which ones need to be checked. The idea of being able to change beliefs. Yeah. What what is the the science of how the beliefs get rooted and then how we can actually change them? It's so difficult because the motivations we have are so subtle and they often work behind the scenes and we're not totally aware of them, but they can completely influence every aspect of of our behavior. And a motivation is like a a poison when it comes to finding out what the truth is. If if what you really want to do is align your beliefs with the truth. And we can talk about whether people actually want to do that. This is not It's not a given. answer that. I don't think they do. Well, yeah, there's there's some research now actually if you ask people, do you think your beliefs should change with evidence? Oh god, what do they say? It depends on the person, but there's a huge portion of American population that doesn't agree that their beliefs should change with evidence. When asked point blank. When asked point blank. So, it's a strange situation, but What reason do they give? Well, you know, there are a lot of different reasons. People often feel like their beliefs and values are things that define them and are to be protected and celebrated. So, and that's that's part of it. There are also um uh religious modes of thought that come into this where faith is a different way of uh finding what the truth is where evidence is explicitly denied. You know, it doesn't matter what the evidence is. This even this confirming evidence can be a a test to see how strongly I believe and I just need to rise to the challenge and show how strong my belief is. But the people that say that, are they all is it a religious thing in nature or this goes across non-religious things? doesn't only apply to religious beliefs. So, you can ask people about a whole range of topics and there's still a portion of them that say that yeah, evidence isn't really isn't really the deal. Okay. Let's say it is. Let's say you're uh a scientist like me and you want to have uh your description of reality match reality as best as you can. Motivation is something you need to remove from the equation as much as possible. And that's what the scientific method is all about, right? We set up all of these procedures to try to make our process of finding the truth and of testing reality as free as possible of all the motivations we know about ourselves. You know, we know when testing a drug, we want it to work, and so if we know who got the drug and who didn't get the drug, we're going to see those results in a slightly different light. So, we blind ourselves. We, you know, put it literally put a blindfold on and make sure that we don't know who's who when doing that. That's the process of trying to remove motivation from the equation because we know how dangerous it is to the process. But in everyday life, we're not running a clinical trial. Motivation is just free to run wild, and it influences every aspect of our behavior. I mean, if you think about your the beliefs that you care about the most, most of us organize our lives in such a way that we never even really have to encounter evidence that challenges our beliefs because we tend to have friends that believe the same things that we do, right? We associate our we create our social circles such that we have people that think similarly to us. That's what's enjoyable to do, right? Online with social media, of course, people form bubbles and associate with people that are going to cheer them on for having the beliefs that they have, not challenge them for, you know, various reasons. So, these motivations are able to put us in a situation where we almost never even have to encounter any any evidence that goes against our beliefs in the first place. That's how smart the brain is at protecting us from this information that that we don't want to see. So, what is the process though of changing? I know you guys have studied in a lab, like what opens people up to being changed? You've got the potential of the backfire effect, which I know is a bit unsettled right now in the science, but it's it hints at something that I think intuitively makes sense to people. Um What what is that tangled web? Yeah, I mean, first of all, there's no good answer. I wish there there was. This is something we need to spend more effort trying to understand about ourselves because now that we live in this deluge of information, you know, we just need to be better at understanding how we respond to it and what the best ways of dealing with them are. So, I like to think of this in terms of how can we ourselves make ourselves more open-minded and keep us open-minded. And one of the things there is putting yourself in situations where you're going to encounter information that challenges you. I mean, that's the first step. You can never change your mind if you don't get out of your bubble at all, right? It's just not going to happen. So, encountering information is is the first step. Then there's the issue of what happens when we encounter some challenge to something that we believe in. And one of the things that happens there is that emotion plays a big role. You know, it it just doesn't feel good to have your beliefs challenged. Let's Let's put a pin in that. Why? Why Like what is it about identity and beliefs and values that become so sacred, might be the right word, that it doesn't feel good to have them challenged? Because when you think about it, so I'll put it in a business context. You obviously see it from a scientific point of view, but for me it's like I'm trying to win in business, and the market is the market. And so, I either make moves that the market rewards or I make moves that the market doesn't. I'm going to go out of business and not be able to pay my employees or myself if I don't figure this out. So, the truth is all that matters of what is working and what is not working. So, to get good at business I had to get very hungry for the truth. So, what is going on that makes people so But and and I guess here's the thing, with the truth in business, it still hurts when I encounter something where I'm like, "You were wrong." That sucks, even now. So, what is happening in my brain and everybody else's brain that makes that disruptive information feel so shitty? I think you hit on the key word there, which is identity. You know, when a belief becomes associated with who we are, then from the brain's perspective, it's part of us, and the brain's primary charge is to protect us and to keep us alive, which it is. We talked about the evolutionary history of where the brain came from and what it what its goal is. It's there to protect ourselves, and ourselves is not just our physical body. The brain extends the self to the psyche, to the psychological selves that we have, to our identity. And that includes that umbrella can include beliefs, values, ideas about what's important to us, ideas about the world, ideas that, you know, we have about ourselves that we think are worth protecting. So, if something comes and challenges that, it's like an actual threat to your personhood from the perspective of the brain, right? That's so weird. And that's what feelings are. Feelings are the brain's signals that there's some kind of a challenge going on to the body, right? If you uh feel your heart racing, and you're uh you have the the impulse to to move because there's some kind of danger out there in the world. That's a feeling that the brain has evolved in order to get you to act in a way that's going to protect yourself, right? And it really is the self more than the body, right? So, it's whoever you think you are, your sense of identity. Um okay, so if we're uh one more thing I think we should cover there is this idea that the brain is using mechanisms that evolved probably for other things. And so, encountering an idea that challenges your beliefs will often trigger the disgust mechanism, which is really interesting. Yeah, it's true. When when we've looked into the brain to see what happens when people are are challenged, we find that again, I always have to throw the caveat out of it's hard to assign a particular function to a particular brain region. But, we do know that the insular cortex receives information from the viscera of the body and is very important for feelings of of disgust. You know, when you encounter spoiled food or something that is just totally nasty that you feel like you want to get away from, right? It's the the brain's way of just rejecting some kind of thing that's bad for you. And here it's being used not just to protect us from spoiled food or a rotten carcass or something that that is going to you know, produce a pathogen that'll make us sick. But also for information. Information that the brain thinks is going to hurt us in some way. Us being whole identity. So, what does that that seems to play out really strangely in real life where people go through So, let's in fact, let's start putting a couple pieces together. So, you've got confabulation. The brain wants consistency so desperately it will make [ __ ] up to get that. Uh and and I'm talking make [ __ ] up. I don't know if we actually closed that loop earlier, but um in the study that I was talking about the doctor So, patient can't form new memories. Doctor comes in, has a pin in his hand, shakes the hand, person jerks back. What the hell? Why'd you do that? They leave, they come back after it was like 3 minutes and the person can't retain the information that long, so does not remember meeting the doctor. Doctor sticks out their hand again, they won't shake it. They make up some story, you know, I never shake hands with people in lab coats. It's a Tuesday, I don't shake hands on Tuesday, whatever. Never getting to the truth which is, oh I remember that you have a pin in your hand and it hurt. But there's some deeper region of the brain going to your point that you're getting all these different pieces of information that get cobbled together into this sense of how to move through the world when one part is broken, the explicit memory. The other part isn't that there is an association with this person in pain, but I don't know how to explain it cuz that's a different region of the brain. Therefore, it makes up a story. So, desire for consistency, confabulation, I'm going to make [ __ ] up if I don't understand it. My beliefs become who I am. I have a disgust mechanism that is used to keep me alive and my brain taps into that to when I feel that discomfort, which I'm oddly enough experiencing it a bodily level, when somebody challenges an idea, which shouldn't have anything to do with who I am, but suddenly does. It triggers all this mechanism and now boom, I reject it as as a matter of life and death cuz it's the ego death of you're challenging who I view myself to be. And now throw in social media for good measure and you get this I saw this chart really interesting of it shows that the person that the political group that gets elected is the political group closest to the middle. And so at least in the US. And so whoever's closest to the middle. But now they're showing like even though that remains true, like the the weight of each party is pushing more and more to either direction. And now so as we push ourselves into these extremes and follow that chain reaction that I just walked through, it gets pretty ugly pretty fast. Yeah, so when you lay it all out like that, it seems like why is it even organized this way? What a shitty system the brain has for figuring things out. [snorts] Um but I think you have to keep in mind that certainly the brain didn't evolve in a situation where we had Facebook and Twitter and and all of this stuff. And there is probably some value in maintaining our beliefs and protecting them to some degree and also in sharing them with other people and building the connections that we have with other people based on shared models of reality, right? This is one of the things that binds us together with other people is we both see the world in the same way. It makes you feel very close to someone. It feels good to have that. It makes a social bond. And there's probably some evolutionary advantage to that, right? In the in the history of humankind to have a community where everybody sees things the same way, um can actually help you work together and to cooperate probably. Okay, so knowing all of that, knowing that because I'm not sure that I will say that the way the brain works [snorts] is bad, I will just say that in modern context you have to really take control. I have a thesis on what people need to do about this. I'll be very curious to see if you have scientific evidence cuz I hunger for the truth because I've learned that it is very useful. Um that there is identity matters and it matters a lot and rather than fight against all of the evolutionary things that I have going on inside my brain and my body, I'm going to leverage them. So I need to build a very strong identity. That identity is going to be built around values and beliefs whether I want it to or not. It's just the way that the brain works. So I need to be very thoughtful about what my beliefs are and what my identity is. And so once you pick an anti-fragile identity, then you can move forward. Meaning anti-fragile Nassim Taleb's phrase that the more it's attacked, the stronger it gets. The human immune system is the example that he used if I remember right. Certainly a great example. You actually need to encounter pathogens in order to get your immune system strong. So it needs to come under assault in order to get stronger. And if it doesn't, then it weakens. Same with trees. If you grow a tree inside of a dome, the tree will fall over when it reaches a certain size cuz there was never any wind to force it to grow stronger root system. Therefore it becomes super fragile. Uh there is an identity that is anti-fragile which is the identity of the learner. And so my sense of self, my self-worth, my self-esteem, my pride, all of it, I have this is what I've done to myself. I've literally wrapped it up in my willingness to learn. So I don't worry about being right. I worry only about identifying the right answer faster than anybody else. And so my self-esteem is tied to a willingness to admit when I'm wrong, a willingness to face that, "Oh God, I'm wrong." and that discomfort, and it makes me angry at you for pointing it out, and I just want to get away from the situation, and I've trained myself to be massively egotistical about my willingness to sit in that discomfort and go, "Huh, this sucks. This hurts. I don't like being wrong. But is there some truth here?" And then teasing that apart. Now, if people do that, I have in my N of 1 study found that it is extraordinarily useful, meaning that it will help you get to your goal. Now, what you choose to aim yourself at can be its own nightmare scenario, but if you're thoughtful about what you aim yourself at, and your identity is about being willing to admit when you're wrong, then you can actually, you know, iteratively become right over time. That's That's amazing. That is great. I totally agree with you. I would take it one step further. I think, you know, in addition to being comfortable with being wrong, we can actually learn to retrain ourselves to value being wrong. I mean, there's How? How do we do that? just being wrong is is actually an opportunity for learning, right? Being wrong is when you find out that you can actually improve something about your model for the world. So, how do we actually retrain ourselves? That's a really interesting question. I'm curious as to how you went about it. I mean, I think that one of the things that helps in a general sense, and one of the things we're looking into now with our our research, is mindfulness training. You know, the idea that if you can just train yourself to have a more objective relationship with your own thoughts, to be more aware of the chain of events that happens in your mind and your body when you encounter something like a piece of evidence that you don't like, and you feel negative, you can start to break the habitual chains of of thought and behavior there because you have a place to intervene. You recognize I'm feeling bad now. This is probably because I'm protecting this belief. I don't like it. Now I'm in a position where I can choose how to respond to that. As opposed to things just happening automatically without your awareness where you don't even have the choice about to react. That's really interesting. As you were explaining that, I was like, "Whoa, meditation or mindfulness maybe is a better word in this connotation is is to the sense of self and your ability to navigate well your own emotions as cutting the corpus callosum is to a seizure where what happens is you have that visceral response. This doesn't feel good. I'm being challenged. You're so used to just enacting what that emotion tells you to do, distance yourself, argue, push the person away, shut them down, whatever your sort of learned behavior is. You just go right into it. Like you never Like the number of times where my wife and I will get in an argument, and it'll be like 10 minutes into the argument where I'm like, "Wait, I didn't need to get mad about that." And if I actually back up to the getting mad part and I address it there and go, "Oh, whoa. I had no idea that that made you feel that way. You know, tell me more." But what's happening is I don't like the way that makes me feel. I feel bad that I've upset her. So my impulse, stupidly, but my impulse is to convince her that she shouldn't have felt that way in the first place because then I don't have to feel bad anymore. But really this is about me just not wanting to feel bad. And if I could have sat there with that for a minute and just listened, then we wouldn't have been into this 10-minute like arguing back and forth. Yeah. And if we can find ways through mindfulness in this example to sort of pattern interrupt, not let that storm just take over, and then you just launch forward. So now my question is, do you use mindfulness and meditation interchangeably? And if not, what is mindfulness? That That's a good question. Let me just add one other thing is that I think there's a there's another effect of mindfulness / meditation that that helps here, which is the de-emphasization of your own identity, right? You don't need to maintain a sense of who you are, and it's not necessarily not necessary to decide for each belief whether this is something that defines you or not, right? You can keep some sort of distance between you and what your mind does in terms of deciding what's true about the world. I think that's one of the things that you learn in mindfulness meditation is to have some kind of uh separation between the machinations of your mind and the actual conscious experience of of being you. And I think that de-emphasis of identity is something that can also help with these kinds of You're going to have to give me more on that. I have an intuitive understanding of what you mean. We may have to talk about psychedelics now. Okay. I've never had the dissolution of self. I don't I I've heard about it. Not at all or just not completely? Uh Cuz it's a range. [sighs] I'm going to say close to not at all. Okay. I've had a sense of like, oh my god, I feel connected. With my wife, I've felt a sense of like, oh my god, we are a unit. So, maybe that, but like, it still feels like an experience I'm having. Right. So, there's um this sort of gets into what is the self that is there to be dissolved. self? And one of the ways to answer that question is to break it down into different pieces. One One of the ways we can do that is to distinguish between the self that is the experience of us in the here and now. So, we have you know, we're sitting here, we can feel the chairs on our butts, we can you know, I feel like the vibration of my muscles as I'm talking. There's an experience of actually being me right now in this moment, and that's like some kind of momentary consciousness of of myself. These things are happening to me. And then on the other hand, there's this self that we have that extends through time. Where we project ourselves into the future and into the past. And we have a kind of a story that we weave of who we are. You know, I'm scientist guy. I grew up on the East Coast. I came out here. Whatever it is, the story that makes up Jonas. That's a narrative self that exists through time. And I really think that the issue when it comes to belief fixation has to do with this narrative self. This story that we weave of of who we are. And this story is a story. It's an interpretation of all our experiences and memories that the brain weaves into this nice little package. Um this you know, I think story is one of the um main mechanisms the brain uses to It's one of the main formats it uses to compress information about the world and to understand, to make meaning out of what's happening. Why is that important? Why is Why Why is compressing and making meaning important? It It feels so foundational to being human. There must be something very important about it. I mean, we just can't understand all of the information that we take in without compressing it somehow. It's just a constant stream of multiple senses all the time. And we have to you know, in in order to be able to navigate the whole complexities of of space-time, we have to somehow make sense of it. And one of the ways the brain is good at doing that, you know, we live in a a social world. This the social world world is is paramount to understanding what's going on around us, to surviving nowadays. We can't survive on our own. We have to do it in relationship with other people. And so, the brain is really good at interpreting things in terms of the motivations and characters and um people in the story that are doing things. And philosopher Daniel Dennett has called this the intentional stance. Or sometimes in psychology, we call it theory of mind. We have these really complicated models of other people and what they're up to and what they're doing. And these form the this is an important part of the story, right? You don't have a story without characters. And so the brain interprets everything in terms of some kind of a story and in terms of our self we are the main character in this story. But in many ways it's a fiction. I mean it's not totally fictional, but it's like historical fiction, right? It's like takes some actual information that we experienced and makes puts some kind of a spin on it. It's a motivated spin. And [clears throat] if you spend a lot of time thinking about the actual story of your life, you can start to you you can you can see tears around the edges. There are threads to pull and you can reveal that to be um the illusion that it is. And I think understanding that your narrative self is some fiction that the brain has come up with is to some extent to what extent is it a fiction? So I'm asked about my life so often that I've mythologized it to make it easy to tell, right? Cuz I to really tell you my life I'd have to get into all the messy like complexity blah blah blah. So it's like you just find sort of key milestones you're like this is my life. But when I tell it I'm like, yeah man this is really condensing. This is like a 3,000 page novel condensed down into CliffNotes. And so it's it's in some ways misleading if somebody were to try to walk in my steps of like yeah I got it wasn't that easy. I actually got this piece here and it took me 2 years to get that piece and cobble it together. But that still feels like yeah I mean I've got the gist of like what it means to be me. But to what depth are we saying that identity is an illusion? Like legitimately me and a rock are connected, not the rock a rock, are connected or No, I think I think you're right that there's a gist of it that probably has some truth that's that's important to us. Um but the details are so unreliable, right? Our memories are so unreliable. Our memory of the past is a active process of interpretation and inference. And what happens when you decide on what the story of your past is and you tell it over and over and over again is that you begin to accept it as a some kind of radical record of what happened. And it isn't, it's an interpretation, it's a reconstruction, and it's error-prone, it's prone to distortion by motivations. It's not to say that it's all wrong or that it has no value at all. But I just think we have to treat it with a with a bit of skepticism. Okay, so I'm treating it with a bit of skepticism. But how do I dissolve it and what is the result of dissolving it? I'd say 150 micrograms of LSD is a good way to get there. But you know, that's that's hitting it with a sledgehammer. There are other ways of doing it. Meditation is one, probably. Various forms of of contemplation. And you know, Tell me what I'd find that way. So I I um, I know you have connection to Sam Harris, you guys have done a lot of stuff together. His description of 5 g of mushrooms was [ __ ] awesome. That was impressive. What what a cool description. Uh, so I in some very distant intellectual way feel like I kind of get what that would be. But like I meditate a lot and I've never had anything that I would say is a dissolution of my sense of self. What when one does it through um, uh, contemplative practice, what's happening? That they just become aware of all the different bits and pieces that cough this up? Is this I mean, you know, part of it is So let's tie this back to the to the brain again. Maybe this will help. We know that um, when people are just lying around thinking, there are certain brain networks that are that come to life, that are active. It was actually kind of a surprise discovery in neuroscience because we had all these experiments where we'd have people lying inside the MRI machine and we do these brief periods of like, you know, do a math task for 30 seconds and then rest for 30 seconds and then do a math task again for 30 seconds. We were always interested in what's happening when people are doing the math task. And somebody at at some point people started to look at those little in between periods when we weren't asking people to do anything. And it turned out there was instead of the brain doing nothing during this time, there was all this incredible activity. There was a tremendous amount of energy being spent in very specific brain networks. It's a brain network that has been called the default mode network, but it's kind of probably a misnomer because it isn't really a default. It's a very active state. And it seems to be involved in many of these processes of self-creation, identity, narrative. When we ask people to listen to stories, for example, we see activity in this network. It's a very active process of of meaning making. And that active process, because the self is one of these pieces one of these artifacts of the meaning making process, if you can just take a break from this constant narration of your thought, there's an experience that happens in between there that is in many ways non-narrative. And this this is part of the dissolution of the self. It's just stopping maintaining this picture of yourself momentarily, this this story. You're just don't have to engage with all the interpretive processes all the time. It's something your brain it's it's a habit for most of us. It's a habit It's very difficult to just sit there and not engage with narrative thought. It seems to happen spontaneously. Um but through practice people can get into these states and have experiences where there is a cessation or at least a temporary pause in this constant narration. And I think that that's one of the ways there through meditation. That's really profound. The default mode network is something I've thought a lot about, but I it's very clear to me that I don't understand it nearly well enough. The fact that we slide into that the sort of automatic pruning of our sense of self. Um what's really interesting, I have a hypothesis that's coming to me in real time, so I'll be very curious to see what you think. That um the psychological immune system is incredibly powerful and incredibly necessary. That the um the most self-delusional are the happiest among us, which is very interesting. When I was young, I didn't have any anxiety whatsoever, but I was also woefully un-self-aware. As I developed and quite frankly cultivated self-awareness, that was There's a a lot of biology behind anxiety, but the reason that for me it got started in the first place was as I developed keen self-awareness, which was incredibly useful in my life. I ended up just stuck in that like obsessive thinking about like how I was being perceived like from every conceivable angle, and it becomes a little sort of crazy-inducing. Um and to some extent I've I've had to learn to get out of that, to stop that. But when I catch myself, and that's where meditation's been really useful, but I'll catch myself sort of pruning my sense of self, if you will. Mhm. And so it's like oh man, I'll have failed on something or somebody will say something that rings a little too true to me on social media, and it's upsetting. And then like I'm brushing my teeth, and I just find myself pruning that sense of self, right? Like reconstructing, like smoothing out, like no, you're still like you know, going to be able to do this or whatever that area is that I need to attend to. And I never put that together that that may be a huge part of the reason the quote-unquote default mode network exists is that your you are maintaining a sense of self that for reasons I don't yet understand become incredibly important, especially when I think about the role of self-confidence and how the difference in how somebody acts with no change in skillset just from 1 minute they feel confident to the next minute they don't or vice versa like you see this play out in sports. That that becomes really important. Yes. The hyperactivity of the default mode network is associated with depression. So there are these states we can get into where you're just over ruminating. You just if you're always thinking about you're always pruning the self and that's all you're concerned with and that is a state of anxiety. You know constantly matter in what way you're pruning yourself? It might matter in what way you're pruning yourself, but I'd still think if you're just obsessed with it, you know, like uh did I say the right thing just back then? Maybe I didn't say the right thing. What is he thinking of me now? There's there's some of that we we all do it obviously and there's some of that that might be healthy in terms of understanding what just what just happened, but there's definitely a level it can get to where it isn't healthy anymore. And so I think with meditation part of what we're learning is how to control those dials, you know, it's yes, actively engaging in some kind of self-creation and and making a good narrative of of our lives like you've done. Um can be psychologically healthy and can be part of our well-being as humans in the time that we live in. On the other hand, it can also create problems. So having the ability to turn that dial down and to engage with the present moment instead of the you know, projecting ourselves into the past or remembering the future projecting ourselves into the future and remembering the past also has a value. Okay, there's two things I really want to get into. One, I I want to come back to storytelling and meaning making and why we do all that, but I want to keep going on this dissolution of self. Okay. So, if dissolution of self is that I stop the sort of just never-ending obsessive um and preening maybe is a better word to use of my sense of self. Um When I am getting into the dissolution of that, is it just to stop the obsessive rumination on myself and to be able to I don't know. Enjoy the present moment. I'm not sure what the right word there is. Or is there something else that the in fact now let's talk about the LSD. Mhm. So, when that sledgehammer comes it it least from what I've heard is often sort of scary. It isn't like, "Oh my god, this is wonderful." It's like a hard thing that you do and when you come out the other side, there's like that pleasure pain balance uh is now tilted because the pain has stopped. It I'm sure feels like, "Whoa, that was amazing." But, amazing in the way that a hard workout is amazing. Uh so, what is happening there that's useful, good, positive? Yeah, so I'd say in in addition to the aspects that you just mentioned there of you stopping the obsessive self-pruning and maybe that takes some attention away from whatever is in the present moment. There is also this aspect of self-dissolution uh particularly at the levels that can happen with with psychedelics where when the boundary between self and other dissolves there's a profound empathy and compassion with others that's gained. I mean part of what makes me me is that I care more about this particular body than about that one sitting across to me, right? But, in a lot of ways the separation between us is artificial and my brain emphasizes it more than it should. Um you know, we we've studied a lot of ways that people are connected with each other in very profound ways that they don't even understand. For example, um the case of the mirror neurons, you know, when we when I see you moving, it actually activates my own motor cortex. We're connected in these very very deep ways. And when we spend a lot of time thinking about ourselves and about the boundaries between our self and the rest of the world when they're very prominent, um that separates us from other people and from the world. And there's definitely a value to uh really feeling on a visceral level that sameness, that deep connection that we have with other people and with nature. Just random side note about deep connection. One of the things I find most interesting about the way that humans are connected in ways they do not understand is that women that live together will synchronize their menstrual cycles, and they'll all synchronize to the dominant female. How [ __ ] crazy is that? Right. Like that's really bananas to me. Yeah, and part of that comes from, you know, the fact that we identify with our minds a lot more than we tend to identify with our with our bodies. There's so much happening in our the subconscious of our minds and in our bodies that's part of the way we interact with each other that we just have no idea about. Yeah, it's crazy. Okay, so I take the sledgehammer to my sense of self. I feel more connected, more compassionate. Um why then when people do LSD what or any psychedelic, why is there such a possibility that you have a {quote} unquote bad trip? Why is it scary? [sighs and gasps] What's scary to lose something that you're attached to. I mean, I think ego dissolution is one of the most frightening things that you can face. It's basically the second time now? Like once you know, like, "Oh, I'm going to feel empathy and connection." I mean, it's death in in a lot of ways, right? You're you're facing the the end of yourself, and yourself does not want to face its own end. So, yeah, it can be very scary. It can be also just challenging in ways that are that don't have to to with the complete dissolution of self. I mean, when you have the world around you is not stable anymore perceptually. It's almost like the feeling you have when an earthquake happens. And we get these in California quite a bit, and there's this just like the ground itself, I can no longer trust it anymore because it's not what I thought it was. I thought the ground was like this thing that just persisted that we all live on. And now it's moving. It just makes me feel completely lost. So, if your whole perceptual world is doing that, and it's not behaving in the way that your brain wants it to, or it expects it to. If you're very attached to, you know, the the things that you see and that kind of a ground, it can be very disconcerting. Yeah, that's interesting. And that goes back to this idea of we're meaning-making machines, right? What does it mean now that things are not stable? What does it mean to have myself dissolve? Yeah. Um do you have a guess? So, I definitely look at things from an evolutionary lens. I know that you rightly look at things that are sort of evolutionarily conjecture. It's like, uh maybe, maybe not. But like, do you have a theory as to why we need meaning? Does it come back to that idea of condensing things down, or is there something else at play? Yeah, I think that not just condensing things down, but also just making uh good predictions about what's going to happen, right? That's, you know, in a lot of ways what what makes a good mind is a mind that can make predictions about the world. And to make a good prediction about the world, you have to have a good model of the world. And a model is always a condensed, compressed version of reality. It's not going to be um as big or as complicated as the real thing. You have to find the important parts to keep in your model. Is that why this reads as a narrative? Is that narrative is sort of by its nature distilled to the important bits? Yeah, I think that is um that is part of it. A narrative is a way that gets at what's important about what happened. And do you think that there's So, I've given my entire professional life to the belief that narrative is the way to really influence behavior and that also you need to focus primarily on kids. My area of interest is 11 to 15, age of imprinting, actually we should talk about cuz I bet you have some insights. But the the way that narrative functions one theory of mind, so there's two incentivize us to do the hard work of trying to figure people out, there has to be some impetus to do it. We have to have sort of an evolutionary push. So, there is something deeply pleasurable about getting it, like understanding what somebody's going through without them just coming out and telling you. In fact, storytelling 101, man, you want the audience to get it. You don't want to tell them. You want them to get it. You want them to understand that the person is unhappy based on their behaviors. You don't want that person to just be like, "I'm so unhappy." Cuz you you deny them the chance to get it for themselves. So, there seems to be like, uh narrative plays with theory of mind, narrative plays with the distillation of what's important, uh definitely triggers high emotion. Yeah, somehow there's something satisfying about the meaning-making process itself. The brain likes to figure things out and get that that pleasure that comes from understanding and that's why I think it is important for for storytellers to leave space for that in their stories, you know. I have this um collaboration now with a filmmaker Mary Sweeney who's a professor at at USC and she's a film editor and we have this podcast where we've been trying to uncover the the parallels between neuroscience and and filmmaking and other creative arts because there there's so many um ways where it where it comes together. But one of the things that's come up over and over again as we talk to various filmmakers and and storytellers is that they really try to leave some kind of space for the audience to do their own active interpretation. And if you give people all of the answers and you just lay everything out there that it's just much less interesting and much less engaging for I used to teach filmmaking and I was teaching an editing class trying to explain like why does this work and I remember thinking that you know, part of why editing works is your brain is making predictions to your point about this may be the whole reason that the brain is so complex and what you take advantage of and and sort of use against the audience to create a cool effect, but is that the prediction of how somebody's moving. So you'll see this now as soon as I say it people are going to start seeing it everywhere. It's called cutting on action. So if I want to cut into a close-up of me right now, in fact this this will be fun. Dear editor, start wide and now I'm going to reach for my cup and if they're smart, they'll cut on that action so that your brain is now predicting that I'm going to pick this up, move it to my mouth. Right. And if you cut on that action, your brain is predicting, oh, that I know exactly how a hand moves when it does something like that. And so while we're filming this live multiple cameras at the same time so it becomes very easy. When you're using a single camera your your the motions don't actually happen at the same time. So the close-up is filmed at a different time than the wide shot. And so you need something to pull the audience across the cut. And that thing is their brain predicting, oh, I know where this is going to go and so as long as the motion feels consistent then the brain just feels like it's happening at the same time even though it's not actually. Right. And you don't have to show everything because the brain is so good at filling in those gaps. It's kind of amazing that we talked to the film editor Walter Murch who edited like Apocalypse Now. god, one of the greatest editors of all time, absolutely extraordinary. Yeah, so he wrote this book called In the Blink of an Eye which is basically all about this. And one of the things he said that I thought was really interesting was that when when filmmakers first started out they they thought that they'd have to just do everything with one continuous cut. Cuz the idea that you could just cut the film and then start somewhere else, it was assumed that this would just be like totally jarring to people. That how would they like make the connection? But we just do it totally effortlessly when we watch films and television. We don't even notice the cuts because our brain is so good at just connecting all the little pieces and what we care about is the actual through line of the story, not the through line of the the visual actions. Yeah, it is man, when you think about all the different things that go into the way you can make a film feel seamless, you really start to In fact, I'd forgotten about this. So I've read that book, absolutely extraordinary. And this I think was teaching film, going to film school, cuz I'm always like I cannot remember what first got me started thinking about the brain was the answer to my problem. It may have been studying film that first put the brain on my radar as like, "Huh, this is interesting." And the more that you learn how the brain is predicting or ways that you can trick the brain. Like for instance, if you want something to seem loud, you first have to go quiet. Cuz there's actually a muscle in the ear that the louder you make something, it starts to tighten up to which is why you can when your favorite song comes on, you've already cranked it up and then your next favorite song comes on, you have to crank it up again. Right. Because that muscle is tightening. And so in film school, they literally trained us like, "Hey, here's what's going on at a biological level that you need to be aware of. The sound is going to go dimmer and so or it will seem like it's getting more quiet." And so they would show great examples like they do this in um God, is it 2001? I can't remember. They do this in sci-fi a lot. Where they'll cut to the outside of space, absolute silence, and then boom, they cut inside when they want something to really pop and be loud because the ear the muscle starts to relax and so bam, you can hit people with something that sounds loud again. There's It's amazing how much knowledge of the perceptual systems there are in the craft of filmmaking. There just like you mentioned something about hearing, about seeing, but then there's also all this knowledge about just human nature that goes into it, right? I mean, what do you have to do to understand how I can show that this person is angrier, that this person is sad? You have to um analyze exactly how people how the perceptual system works in terms of how people understand other people. This is partly what we study as neuroscientists. How do How does the brain read off another human being and understand what it is that they're up to? Yeah, that that's what's crazy. And then you've got there are multiple ways to do it, right? So, I can uh they did this really famous one where they cut to a person a blank expression, and then you show one audience, then they cut to them looking at the baby, and they say, "Oh, person wasn't actually looking at the baby, for the record. Person was cut totally different They The person being filmed didn't even know that they would eventually be cut with looking at a baby." Just a blank expression, then the baby. "Oh, tell us how you felt." "Oh, the joy, you know, of having an infant." Then they would take the same person, same face, same shot, nothing new, and then they would cut to a coffin. "Oh, what's the person feeling?" "Oh, sad, you know, lost." It's like, "Nope, neither of those are true, but when you see those two things juxtaposed, your brain, to your point about like the the squares on a piece of paper, when your brain thinks that one is in shadow, it just tells you that it's a different color or different shade, even though it's not actually. Um but then there's also just theory of mind, reading someone's facial expression and saying, "Oh my god, that's sadness or anger or whatever." And that you can get the same feeling. Then you can start adding music, right? And ominous music makes you take one blank expression and read it one way. I mean, just absolutely insane. All the cues that we pick up and even sound, like this this is fascinating. I don't know if this is true, but I heard an apocryphal story about how Hitler would play brown noise. Like it's this real rumbles your your guts, basically, and is very uncomfortable, but you don't hear it. So it's subsonic. So it just makes you feel something but you don't hear anything. You're like, "Oh god, I'm uncomfortable." And then when he would walk on stage he would turn it off. So his presence made you feel better. I don't know if it's true but Jesus, that is I mean, you want to talk about sinister [ __ ] that you can really do to manipulate people? Absolutely incredible. Now of course the the tool is agnostic. What you use it for becomes the thing. But in filmmaking like how you distill all of that understanding of the human animal. But then again, I get back into how much of my life is being unintentionally manipulated by things like that. Whatever that may be. Like I remember the first time I realized that when I'm cold, I feel anxious. And I was like, "Why would that be true?" And then I realized that that slightly shivery feeling of being cold is exactly the same of a bodily sensation when I'm getting anxious. And so I was like, "Whoa, so my brain has connected this this like slightly shivery uncomfortable feeling with anxiety. So whether I'm feeling it because something is making me anxious or because I'm cold, my brain is reading it as anxiety." That's right. There are so many similar physiological states that the brain can interpret in different ways. And then we end up really experiencing it as that. You know, there's this famous experiment with the the bridge. So people had to walk across this um really high up uh suspension bridge. It was kind of scary. And um when they got to the other side, there was a confederate, someone working with the experimenter who would come and ask them to participate in the survey. This was done back in the '70s. The participants in the study were young men and it was an attractive woman at the other side of the of the um of the other side of the bridge and she gave them her number to presumably follow up on the experiment. Um the the men who had walked across the shaky, scary version of the bridge were much more likely to call this girl That's interesting. than the guys who went across the safe bridge. The idea is that they're experiencing this physiological arousal and then they're confronted with this attractive woman. So, the the the interpretation, the brain putting A and B together, thinks I must be I'm feeling this because I'm feeling something related to this woman. I'm attracted to her. Confabulation. Yeah. Dude, this is So, you asked earlier how I um had sort of reinforced in myself the antifragile identity of being the learner. And one of the ways that I reinforce things in my mind is I embody the emotion I want to feel Mhm. because of that what you just described, where your brain is going to tell us story. Oh, wow, we're really hyped up about this thing. It must really matter. And you can use that. In the beginning, it feels a bit theatrical, like you're sort of making it up. Like when I first launched Impact Theory, I knew what I wanted to feel. I knew what I wanted the company to do, which is basically my whole thing is I am not prepared to live in a world where your zip code is the number one predictor of your future success, which it currently is in most of the developed world. So, I'm just like, yeah, I'm not I'm not okay with that. So, now I need to get emotionally tied to that. Because the day before, literally, Monday was my last day at Quest and I was all about ending metabolic disease and Tuesday was my first day at Impact Theory. And so, I had to switch. So, it was, okay, I'm I'm closing the door on what I was doing there and my mission. I need a new mission. It's going to be different, but I want to feel that same sense of like just this really matters. This is a big deal. This is very important to me. And so, in the beginning, I just started saying, this is really important to me." But, I didn't say it, "This is very important to me." I was like, "You don't understand! Like, this is important, and I'm going to do whatever I need to do to make sure that I stick through this." Now, in just in saying it that way, in embodying it, moving more, elevating my voice, my brain was like, "Whoa, like this must be a thing." Now, of course, in the beginning, it just felt theatrical. But, 6 months in, it was so ingrained in me that this was important, and every time I talked about it, I would get super animated, and it it became this like self-reinforcing loop. And so, all of these things that we learn that the brain is doing, that it's confabulating, that it's got all these perceptual cues, um you can use them to your own advantage. And they work even when you know what you're doing. That's a great example of how this kind of self-analysis can be useful, right? I mean, a lot of times, one of the things I struggle with in neuroscience is we learn all this basic information about how the brain works, and then what do you actually do with it, or is there anything you can do with it? And that's a perfect example of a sort of self-hack that you can come up with to improve yourself just from understanding how your brain works. No doubt. And when I read Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions Are Made, that was one that it went against everything that I thought I knew. But, then as I read it and understood it more, I was like, "Oh my god, like I can use this to my advantage." One, it explained the cold thing. And so, I was like, "Oh, wow, like this is exactly what's going on. My brain is trying to make sense of what I feel. And now, I can begin to I mean, this Have you seen A Clockwork Orange? Oh god, so fascinating how they make him vomit or give him something that makes him vomit and then watch like violent things to make him less violent. And utterly fascinating idea, and you can actually do that. You can associate negative things that don't feel good with the things you don't want to do or think about it and you can associate positive things with what you do want to feel. And reading that book and understanding, "Whoa, like this is really this two-way communication between my brain and my body." That got me really hardcore about my diet. And so, that's when I began to realize, "I think there's a connection between what I'm eating and my anxiety." And that ended up being transformational because my gut was sending signals Yeah. um that I felt anxious, but it was actually from things I think mostly what I was drinking. I was Monster, I miss you dearly. But I was drinking zero-calorie Monster and a lot of Diet Coke. And uh as soon as I cut that out, my anxiety cut 70%. I mean, it was it was unbelievable. I wouldn't have believed it if somebody else had told me. Um but when I cut that out, I was no longer getting that signal, which is I mean, the connection between the gut and the brain is just so much stronger than we ever thought. The the way the nervous system innervates the gut, it's one of the oldest parts of the nervous system really. And the connections between what happens in our gut and our brain, we're still just discovering every day, you know, more connections. Yeah, it is crazy. What is the like if for me the corpus callosum, the split-brain patient is like the most [ __ ] fascinating thing ever in neuroscience, what is that thing that like just trips you out? Wow. Um there's so many. I mean, the the split-brain was definitely one of the first for me. But you know, the field of of neuropsychology, which is the study of how different kinds of brain damage affect the mind. Um it was just so important for me in understanding how little little changes, first of all, how changes to the the flesh of your actual body can change your mind. Just totally cuts through any kind of philosophical arguing about an example? the relationship between the mind and the brain. So, you know, just the fact that you can have complete amnesia from losing your hippocampus, your temporal lobe. You've taken out a piece of the brain and now you've just lost a cognitive function completely. Um but there are so many really subtle interesting neurological cases like we mentioned um Anton syndrome but another form of that is um what's called anosognosia. So this is the the unawareness of some kind of deficit you have. It generally happens for a paralysis. So for hemiparesis you have damage to say the right parietal lobe and your left arm isn't working anymore. You're basically paralyzed. But the people seem completely unaware about the status of their own arm. If you ask them like, "Hey, how's your arm doing?" They're like, "Oh, it's fine. No problem." And you say, "Okay, here's like a tray full of full of glasses. Can you just pick it up?" And you know, if you know that your arm isn't working, you reach out for that tray to grab it in the center so that nothing falls. But they'll just like reach out with one hand Whoa. if the other one is there. They're expecting it to be there and everything just falls over. What do they say then when you say "Oh, I I don't know what happened. I'm such a klutz or something like that." You know, you can even show them in the mirror. You can say, "Look at your arm. Now try and move your arm." And they're like, "Okay, I did." And did you see your arm move? Yeah, yeah, I just I just lifted it. Whoa. It's one of these cases where the feeling of moving is is not uh being properly processed by the brain. They're sending these motor signals out and much of our experience of moving comes from the outgoing motor signals, not from the feelings coming back from our from our limbs. That's a trip. So you feel that movement happening and the feeling is so compelling that again the brain is willing to stitch together any story to not give up on that the truth of that feeling. Wow. Yeah, that like that kind of stuff is what makes me go, "Oh, I can't just trust my emotions." Because man, the brain is doing its best and God bless it. It really does a good job on balance, but wowza, there are some things that it just really gets quote unquote wrong. And I will say that wrong does have a definition. If you have a goal and something moves you away from that goal, I'm going to call that wrong. Sure. Uh and since my my joy is a joyful, fulfilled life, there are many things that my brain does that does not lead me down that path. Right. Absolutely crazy. Um I had heard about that before, but I never had pushed to find out like what that next stage was of like how they think about it. Um it makes me think of the homunculus. Mhm. Explain to people what that is and then I have a very specific question about it. Okay, so homunculus means little man. And it just comes in the fact that there is this map in the human brain. I mean, the brain has a lot of different maps to the outside world. And some of the earliest maps that were discovered are maps of the sensory body and maps of the the um the different muscles that we can move in our body. So, some of this was mapped out by a guy named Wilder Penfield, who was a neurosurgeon at McGill. And they have these brain surgeries where you could have the brain open while the person's in surgery because there are no pain receptors in the brain. It doesn't hurt to have it open and to have the neurosurgeon poke around in there. And partly what they wanted to do is map out, you know, where is the where are certain functions that we want to avoid? For example, if we're going to excise a part of the brain to treat the epilepsy, we want to make sure we don't take out a speech center. So, they do this kind of careful mapping. And one of the things he found is that there was a a very orderly arrangement on the surface of the cerebral cortex. In the postcentral gyrus, there's this map of the sensory body. So, if you stick an electrode in one place and you put a little current in there, the person would feel a tingling in their finger. You move it a little bit and then they feel it in their elbow. And then in their neck. And you can map out the whole human body over the course of this one gyrus, this one lump in the cerebral cortex. And everyone has a pretty similar map. That's That's the sensory homunculus. On the other side of the central sulcus is the precentral gyrus, and that has a a map that corresponds to all the different uh muscles in the body. So, if you stimulate there in one location, you can get, you know, a finger to twitch or uh a toe to twitch, depending on where where it is that you stimulate. I did not know that. There's a map. And then, you know, you mentioned transcranial magnetic stimulation. This is a stimulation you can do through the head. So, TMS is a technology that allows you to create to induce electrical current in the brain without having to open up the skull. You just put this coil of wires next to the head and turn it on and off really quickly, and it creates a little um magnetic field that induces a current, and you can stimulate the motor cortex. If you put it in the right place, you can get someone's finger to twitch. That's crazy, and we'll come back to TMS, cuz I find it very I I have a a question about whether something I heard about it is true or not, which is very interesting. But, going back to the homunculus for a second. So, it's got this map. The map is distorted, so your hands are gigantic, your lips are gigantic, because they're very sensitive, and we get a ton of data from them. But, there one question in all the maps, they never show the genitals as being sort of outsized, but I would say those are pretty sensitive. Are they not outsized? Are people just doing the drawing to be sort of politically correct? Or are they really not They're there. They're there, and they are outsized. Yeah, they would have to be ridiculously large, right? Yeah, I mean, I guess that's a personal thing. [laughter] But, they're they kind of hang right over the um the corner of the top of the cerebral cortex going into the medial surface. And if I'm not mistaken, they're next to the feet. Yes, they're next to the feet, right? That's so weird. Why? Uh oh, I don't know why it's organized in the way that it is, but, you know, I think this leads to some of the sort of cross sensations that we get. If something happens to be next to it on the map, you can get these, you know, if you touch your feet, you can feel it in your genitals or something like that because of the the the closeness, the real estate. The interesting part about that, and I'm curious to know if this has anything to do with it. So, a the sort of joke fetish that everybody will bring up is a foot fetish. Yeah. And as somebody who was once walking the streets of Paris, and a guy came up to my wife and asked if he could take photos of her shoes. Wow. And but I wasn't standing next to her at the time, and so I come up and this guy's taking picture of her feet. I'm like, "Honey, I promise you he was not taking photos of your shoes." But uh she was like, "What?" And so in the in the map, if you were to lose your feet, which has happened to some people, the brain is so expecting stimulation from that area. If it doesn't get it, then other areas will begin to bleed into that region. Mhm. And since the genitals are right next to the feet, there are people that have had their feet or foot amputated who experience orgasm in their phantom foot. Wow. Which is crazy. crazy. I'm like, this is the brain is so fascinating to me. maps are plastic. They can change, you know, if you losing a foot is an extreme example. But if you just aren't using or not receiving sensory input from a location of the body for a long period of time, like if you just like, you know, tape two fingers together so you're not getting any information from them separately, then you can see the map start to reorganize. How fast? Uh within days. It's insane. I heard somebody they were hypothesizing, they obviously don't know, it hasn't been studied as far as I know, um that part of the reason that we may dream with visual hallucinations is to keep the visual cortex going at night because it's so quickly, like if you blind your fold yourself um for even a short period of time, you begin to notice that, "Whoa, I'm really hearing things that I wasn't hearing previously." [snorts] And so that very rapidly those areas of the brain become allocated to other things. Yeah, I think this is David Eagleman's theory. Yes, you're absolutely right. It's a pretty interesting idea. I don't know if the reorganization He has some evidence that the reorganization can happen that fast. Like, you know, if you just didn't get visual input for one night that other regions of the brain will start to encroach on the visual cortex and you'd lose it. So the brain has to keep it stimulated. I think it's really interesting idea. Very interesting. All right, transcranial magnetic stimulation. I heard at one point that you could take somebody that can't draw well at all, zap them with TMS, and their drawing improves like 400% or whatever instantly. Mhm. I'm I'm [clears throat] not familiar with a study that shows that. I will say that you can change people with TMS at least temporarily. Give me some examples. different ways of using TMS depending on the kind of stimulation that you do, you know, the frequency and pattern of of bursts that you do that you can create long-lasting changes that either activate, you know, increase the activity of a brain region, or inhibit the activity of a brain region. It could be like a we call a virtual lesion. It's you're kind of turning off temporarily one one region of the brain. You can see how that works. Um I I have a colleague that a guy that works with me um his name is uh Leo Kristoff Moore, and he did a study with TMS where he was able to show that stimulating certain part of the frontal lobe that he could make people more generous. That we give them some kind of a game where they You give them some money and you say, "You've got $10, and this is a real person who lives in Los Angeles. You have the opportunity to give up some of the money to that person." And they were either wealthy people or poor people, and you could sort of see how the the amount that people gave. There's no reason to give. There you know, it's all anonymous. Nobody's going to know whether you do it or not. People do actually give money in that circumstance. But then if you zap their frontal lobe, you can get them to give you more. Wow. Because there are these sort of inhibitory inhibitory control mechanisms that you're you're damping down. So, are you turning an area off or on? In this case, you're turning an area off. And the area off though is a is something that is inhibitory? Yeah. So, you're off the you know if you would naturally just without this inhibitory control, you would just be totally generous and give away everything you own. But you've got some kind of mindset that's like, well, I should keep some for me. I mean, you know, this Why does this guy deserve it? And like I could probably put it to better use than he can anyway. Whatever that process is that, you know, um in inhibits the impulse to just totally give it away. That's so interesting to me that some things are like a move towards and some things are move away. Yeah. And that generosity is turning some turning an inhibitory impulse off. I would not have guessed that it was that way. I would have guessed that you were creating generosity, a desire for something. Yeah. Well, in another analogy is we know what I mentioned the mirror neurons earlier which help us to understand the correspondences between each other. When I see you do something, I map it onto my own body, my own motor cortex to understand by kind of simulating what it is that you do. And the a consequence of that is that it's I'm able to do what you do. It can we can imitate each other. And there is a kind of um subconscious imitation that happens it to people when they're near each other. This is like an emotional contagion or if like, you know, I start to lean up for a while like you might to lean up and then I lean back and that that sort of thing. There are some people that have damage to the prefrontal cortex and have an uncontrolled imitation of others. Woah. So, I'll do something and the person will just automatically imitate me and and they don't stop it. Which reveals that there is this mechanism in the frontal lobes that kind of damp down our our impulse to imitate each other and to just constantly um map onto each other. that before. I knew about mirror neurons, but I didn't realize that there was a, um, a damage to an area where you could get people that would just copy it automatically. Yeah, the mirror neurons are subject to some higher order control. That is really, really interesting. Jonas, this has been so much fun. Where can people learn more about you, follow along? Uh, they can find me on Twitter at Jonas_Kaplan. I think something like that. If you Google my name, you'll find me. I'm out there. Amazing. Dude, thank you so much for coming on the show. Guys, this is somebody that really understands the brain. And if there's anything you really need to understand in order to get ahead in life, I'm telling you it is the brain. But speaking of other things that can help you get ahead in life, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.